Chancellor college students donate 4 boreholes to communities in Zomba

The Geography and Earth Sciences department of the Chancellor College has donated 4 boreholes to communities surrounding Lake Chilwa in Zomba to improve health and sanitation.

Professor Tambulasi ( in black suit) during the handover ceremony

05October

Speaking during the presentation, Principal for Chancellor College, Professor Richard Tambulasi said the department drilled these boreholes in an effort of finding and providing clean and safe water for the communities.

Professor Richard Tambulasi said this is a part of giving back to the communities as a public institution therefore it is imperative for us to engage in community outlets and support the people that surround us.

“Within our portfolio of research, we carried out this critical aspect of water and land use and discovered that there is a big problem when it comes to availability of safe water hence coming up with these four boreholes,” said Professor Tambulasi.

Evance Mwathunga, Geographer at Chancellor College added that the research they conducted has helped them come up with availability of water without salinity.

“Lake Chilwa is saline in nature but our main focus was to find the availability of water in terms of quality and content. Many boreholes around here usually don’t last because of the saline water but the state of the art equipment that we used has helped us provide clean and safe water to this community,” said Mwathunga.

Chairperson for Chirimba Committee, Eluby Chataika said the boreholes will ease water and sanitation problems that they have been facing over the years.

“We are so grateful to Chancellor College for the boreholes. We have been suffering from waterborne diseases including cholera because of the drying up of LAKE Chilwa. This will improve our health and sanitation within the community,” said Chataika.

Driven by their passion and research project of capacity building in hydro biophysics, students in the geography and earth sciences department at Chancellor College embarked on a one year project to map ground water supply in the Lake Chilwa Basin.

For so long, people around Lake Chilwa have used the Lake as their source of water and a few boreholes that were sank in the area produced water that was saline and untreated.

Four communities have benefitted from the research that these students carried out which resulted in the sinking of four boreholes in areas of T/A Chikowi, Kagula, Chirimba and Likapa.

The 4 boreholes have been sunk with the help of Geo Scientists without border from USA in partnership with Chancellor College, to a tune of 14 million kwacha and will benefit over 1500 households in Zomba District.